Elsie's Womanhood eBook

CHAPTER TWELFTH

“Bring flowers, fresh flowers
for the bride to wear;
They were born to blush in her shining hair;
She’s leaving the home of her childhood’s
mirth;
She hath bid farewell to her father’s hearth;
Her place is now by another’s side;
Bring flowers for the locks of the fair young
bride.”

—­MRS.
HEMANS.

A fair October day is waning, and as the shadows deepen
and the stars shine out here and there in the darkening
sky, the grounds at the Oaks glitter with colored
lamps, swinging from the branches of the trees that
shade the long green alleys, and dependent from arches
wreathed with flowers. In doors and out everything
wears a festive look; almost the whole house is thrown
open to the guests who will presently come thronging
to it from nearly every plantation for miles around.

The grand wedding has been talked of, prepared for,
and looked forward to for months past, and few, if
any, favored with an invitation, will willingly stay
away.

The spacious entrance hall is brilliantly lighted,
and on either hand wide-open doors give admission
to long suites of richly, tastefully furnished rooms,
beautiful with rare statuary, paintings, articles of
vertu, and flowers scattered everywhere, in bouquets,
wreaths, festoons, filling the air with their delicious
fragrance.

These apartments, waiting for the guests, are almost
entirely deserted; but in Elsie’s dressing-room
a bevy of gay young girls, in white tarletan and with
flowers in their elaborately dressed hair, are laughing
and chatting merrily, and now and then offering a
suggestion to Aunt Chloe and Dinah, whose busy hands
are arranging their young mistress for her bridal.

“Lovely!” “Charming!” “Perfect!”
the girls exclaim in delighted, admiring chorus, as
the tirewomen having completed their labors, Elsie
stands before them in a dress of the richest white
satin, with an overskirt of point lace, a veil of
the same, enveloping her slender figure like an airy
cloud, or morning mist, reaching from the freshly gathered
orange blossoms wreathed in the shining hair to the
tiny white satin slipper just peeping from beneath
the rich folds of the dress. Flowers are her only
ornament to-night, and truly she needs no other.

“Perfect! nothing superfluous, nothing wanting,”
says Lottie King.

Rose, looking almost like a young girl herself, so
sweet and fair in her beautiful evening dress, came
in at that instant to see if all was right in the
bride’s attire. Her eyes grew misty while
she gazed, her heart swelling with a strange mixture
of emotions: love, joy, pride, and a touch of
sadness at the thought of the partial loss that night
was to bring to her beloved husband and herself.